Looking back at my earlier posts on the Bourgeois Gentilhomme production, they seem to be all about the technique of staging, without saying anything about interpretation, about how these technical matters might alter the way we perceive the play.
In comparison to works like Le Misanthrope or Tartuffe, the Bourgeois can seem a little one-dimensional and mean-spirited. The would-be gentleman’s pretensions are held up to ridicule at every juncture; he is easily duped, and in the end, thoroughly deluded. There are some good jokes, and classic scenes, like the one with the maître de philosophie, that blend fantasy and satire, but it can all leave one feeling a little weary. The whole turquerie business, reduced to stage directions and nonsense lyrics, just seems like a senseless piling-on.
That’s why the music and dance are so essential, and yet including them, even performing them to perfection, is not enough; it has to be done in the right spirit, and that spirit has to match the one that the play as a whole conveys.
From the DVD booklet and the documentary portion of the DVD, as well as from the performance itself, it’s clear that the creators of this production conceived that spirit to be one not just of mockery, but of generosity and empathy. We’re made to enter into M. Jourdain’s fantasies. Everything, music, dance, gesture, costumes, lighting, even the stylized pronunciation, serves to embody them, make them sensuous and irresistible.
As played by Olivier Martin Salvan, Jourdain is not grotesque; he’s youthful, eager, clumsy, naive, and given to fits of impatience. The fact that he’s drawn not just to material splendor but to “the finer things” (les belles choses) is what cements the union of the arts in the play and lifts it into another dimension. It becomes not just farce but a sort of grand allegory. The production commentary doesn’t shy from drawing the parallel between Jourdain as patron of the arts and the play’s own patron and principal audience: the king himself.
Whether or not Louis XIV could look into this parodic mirror with equanimity (and how could a Sun King do less?), the opposite happens here as well: things outwardly ridiculous take on a kind of wonder and poetry. The booklet points out the best example of this: the maître de philosophie (played brilliantly by Lazar himself) teaching M. Jourdain the vowels. Empty concepts are something Molière can never resist parodying, but here the philosopher’s demonstration is so funny and so lovely that we can only echo M. Jourdain: vive la science!
The generous spirit encompasses the other characters as well. Dorante’s unscrupulous manipulation of Jourdain, borrowing money from him and pretending to further his courtship of Dorimène while actually courting her himself, makes him the most dubious character in the play, but here we mostly just admire his smoothness and finesse as he deftly sidesteps each new complication that his own game lands him in. We can hardly grudge him getting the girl rather than Jourdain, who after all has a wife already.
Finesse, grace in every sense, is what the play celebrates. Those who have it can be forgiven a lot. And those who don’t, like M. Jourdain, are not to be condemned for aspiring to it.
The standard published text of the play opens with the following stage direction (my translation):
The overture is played by a large ensemble of instruments; at center stage, a pupil of the Music Master is seen, composing at a table an air that the Bourgeois has commissioned for a serenade.
What we see in the Lazar/Dumestre production, after the overture, is a white-faced figure wielding a quill over a portable writing desk strapped in front of him, singing, humming, and writing to the accompaniment of a theorbo in the pit. The singer who will sing the song later in the scene enters, listens, approaches, and flirts with him as he finishes the song. It’s an enchanting opening, and I particularly admired the way the Lully air had been adapted to give an impression of being composed on the spot. Well, as it turns out, that was Lully’s doing. Here’s how it looks in the facsimile 1690 Philidor score:
The portable desk, the flirting, and so on, are embellishments, apparently, but they seem to flow as seamlessly from the score as the theorbist’s realization of the unfigured bass.
It takes nothing away from Vincent Dumestre and Le Poème Harmonique to observe that the understanding of Lully as a theatrical composer has evolved tremendously in recent years; without William Christie, Jordi Savall, Marc Minkowski and others working in French baroque opera, not to mention movies like Tous les matins du monde and Le roi danse, a production like this would hardly have been conceivable. I first heard Lully’s music for the Bourgeois in the early eighties, and though it was attractive enough, it had little of the rhythmic verve and spontaneity that later groups—and none more than Dumestre’s—have learned to give it. The dances were stately, “comic” numbers sounded unfunny as only opera singers can make them, and there was nary a line of spoken dialogue in the whole recording. It was hard to imagine what it all had to do with Molière.*
And that’s pretty much how it was regarded for several centuries, despite periodic attempts at revival. From now on, anyone attempting a “straight” production of this play is going to have to anticipate being asked “but where’s the music?”
*addendum: This was almost certainly the 1973 recording with Gustav Leonhardt directing La Petite Bande, an ensemble formed for the express purpose of recording this music. Listening to it again (or excerpts from the CD, which I assume was just a re-issue of the LP), I have to say it holds up pretty well. But this opening number, not at all. It’s so obviously not a real staging, but a half-hearted “concert” impression of one, that it has no impact either dramatically or musically. No wonder I forgot it was even there. Still, Leonhardt and La Petite Bande must be given credit for beginning the modern revival of this score.
In France and elsewhere in Europe they’ve been talking about this production ever since it premiered six years ago. Here it is known to early music lovers, because of the splendid performance by Le Poème Harmonique of Lully’s complete score for this, the last and largest of the comédie-ballets he did with Molière. But otherwise I don’t think many on this side of the Atlantic are aware of it. It continues to tour in Europe, but as far as I know has not yet played in North America.
As yet I have only seen clips of the splendid video version, which lists for close to $100 around $20 on Amazon, and is PAL format only, so in the States and Canada you’d also need a region free player to watch it. But it looks well worth it.
I’ll have more to say when I’ve seen the whole thing. But it’s already plain to me that it really is a landmark, particularly for the theater. There have been plenty of good productions of baroque opera in recent decades, but this takes an entirely different direction (this is not opera, for one thing). What it does, in fact, is finally apply all the vitality of the early music movement to the theater. Baroque gesture, dance, pantomime, reconstructed 17th century pronunciation, candle footlights, frontal playing, all done with the greatest conviction, imagination, humor, and verve, and without the slightest concession to “contemporary relevance” or directorial “concepts.” In Europe, where that sort of nonsense has been even more rampant than here, it must seem more than just a breath of fresh air. No wonder people love it.
Not everyone, of course. Some in France haven’t been too wild about the period pronunciation, which is taken pretty far here. Many others are charmed by it. It’s a complicated issue – as one critic points out, to a modern audience the effect is in any case exotic, as it would not have been to an audience of Louis XIV’s time, so “authenticity” in this case defeats itself. But paradoxes of this sort are second nature to the current generation of early musicians, who do not take them (or themselves) too seriously. In the best, like Le Poème Harmonique, what you see is a passion for discovery and reinvention, with very little dogma. Now it seems that spirit has reached the theater as well. At least in France.
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